1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus and method for packet buffer management in an Internet Protocol (IP) network system.
2. Description of the Related Art
One of required features of next-generation Internet is high reliability.
With an increase of higher value-added mission-critical traffic, real-time traffic, and high-priority traffic, a need for stably servicing the traffics is increasing.
As a network evolves into a high speed and large capacity network, the network processes much more data transmission. This leads to traffic congestion in a network zone, causing a loss of user data and causing the degradation of performance between end-to-end users.
The Next generation of the Internet basically requires an efficient and effective mechanism for, upon the occurrence of network failure, detecting the failure within a short time, recovering from the failure within a short time, and continuing to provide a service.
Thus, even when congestion occurs at a specific link of a network due to a flood of user traffic, it can be regarded as another cause of a network failure.
In the event that an amount of user data flooding in a link corresponding to an optimal path exceeds an optimal transmission degree of the link, user data may be lost. Such a loss of user data leads to data re-transmission between end-to-end networks, affecting a quality of network service.
Thus, when congestion occurs because of the flood of user data, how long time packets are stored with no packet loss for each link is considered a factor of significance.
In a conventional network system, when traffic floods into a specific zone of a network and congestion occurs at a corresponding port, packets are processed as much as they can be stored in a packet queue for each corresponding port and other packets exceeding a storage capacity are dropped. Undoubtedly, a variety of algorithms such as Random Early Detection (RED) and Weighted RED (WRED) have been developed as a packet drop way.
However, how long time packets can be stored before being dropped is basically a factor of significance. For this, there is needed a consideration for how efficiently a limited packet buffer is managed.
FIG. 1 shows a management scheme for a packet buffer allocated every link and used in a conventional network system.
Assuming that there are ‘m’ number of queues at a link and the queue has the limited ‘n’ number of packet buffers, each queue is set, at the time of initial system driving, to store the maximum ‘n/m’ number of packet buffers. If congestion occurs at the link, packets exceeding the ‘n/m’ number are dropped.